


The Language of Flowers

by lovetincture



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Dark Will Graham, Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, M/M, Murder Husbands, Pining, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 22:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Hannibal hurt him, betrayed him, warped him and tried to bend his mind to Hannibal’s own design. He knew that. He wanted to hate him for it. But Hannibal had saved a daughter for him, had carved him a family out of blood and cartilage and bone, had made a place in the world for the three of them.Hannibal loved him.He sees it now, but he sees it too late. There are so many things that can’t be undone.* * *Hannibal flees, and Will pursues. A love letter in corpses.





	The Language of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> Floriography, the language of flowers, is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers.

Will is good at reading people, good at getting into their heads. It’s what he does. In this case, it’s what he’d bet his life on.

But he didn’t see it.

Or at least, he didn’t see it until it was too late.

Hannibal hurt him, betrayed him, warped him and tried to bend his mind to Hannibal’s own design. He knew that. He wanted to hate him for it.

But Hannibal had saved a daughter for him, had carved him a family out of blood and cartilage and bone, had made a place in the world for the three of them.

Hannibal  _ loved _ him.

He sees it now, but sees it too late. There are so many things that can’t be undone.

_ I forgive you, Will. _

Will presses and presses against Abigail’s neck, but her heart does its job, pumping her lifeblood out in ever weaker streams. It runs through his fingers like water, staining everything red. He hadn’t been able to save her last time, and he can’t save her now.

It had been Hannibal that saved her, Hannibal who stopped the bleeding in her parents' kitchen, a sure hand clamped over her throat to hold the blood in. And now it was Hannibal that had killed her, devil and angel both.

Will’s fingers slip against Abigail’s throat, and he lets them fall. She’s still bleeding, but she's already stopped moving. His eyes slip shut, and he listens to her choked, quiet gasps.

_ Will you forgive me? _

The sick thing, Will thinks as he listens to the girl he’d loved like a daughter bleed out—the sick thing is that he would.

He thinks he would forgive Hannibal anything, knows Hannibal would do the same. He can’t identify the feeling that bubbles up at that. Is that horror or is it relief?

Why does love feel so very much like pain?

* * *

Hannibal leaves him with a scar.

It doesn’t become a scar for months. At first it’s a raw, gaping wound, his guts and intestines held in with staples and surgical thread, tape and gauze. 

He’s arrested, of course he’s arrested. He was wanted for the murder of Randall Tier. He’d have run if that had been an option, if he hadn’t been dying in a pool of his own blood—his and Abigail’s together like a particularly gruesome family bonding exercise.

In the hospital, they handcuff him to the bed and post a guard outside his door.

It’s nothing like the precautions they took when they thought he might actually be a dangerous psychopath. The funny thing is they were probably right, but now everyone has decided Will is harmless, if a bit over eager in his pursuit of justice, and that makes it easier to run. Makes it easier to dislocate his thumb, pull his hand through the cuffs and rip out the IVs.

He gives the guard a concussion and disappears.

There are the dogs to consider. There are always the dogs. Will thinks about calling in an anonymous tip to animal control services, but he can’t do that to them. He can’t bear the thought of them being cooped up in cages, tries not to think about the way he’d been ready to inflict just that on Hannibal.

He goes home despite the risk. He turns the dogs loose in the forest, despite the cold, and Hannibal’s words come to mind unbidden.

_ Is it mercy or murder? _

Both. Neither. None of those exist. No good or evil, no gods and no masters.

Alana would have watched his dogs. It’s an absurd thought, but it’s the one that brings him to his knees. He howls his grief, and it doesn’t matter. There’s no one here to hear him. The woods behind his house are silent and impassive, indifferent to his pain.

There’s no one to watch his dogs because everyone is dead. A painful, hard knot forms in his throat when he remembers, so he mostly tries not to. He sees them in his dreams, and in his dreams he steps over their bodies to join Hannibal in a bloody dance.

Their red-stained fingers reach out, and he and Hannibal sidestep them effortlessly.

* * *

He gets off a plane at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. It’s wishful thinking, maybe. They’d planned to come here together. It’s probably foolish to expect that Hannibal still would.

Foolish, sentimental, possibly courting death even if he is right. There’s nothing to say Hannibal won’t stab him again on sight, maybe do a better job of it this time.

But Will knows he won’t, the same way he knows Hannibal is here in this city somewhere, hiding.

_ Waiting, _ he thinks but doesn’t say, although he’s developed a bad habit of talking to himself in the weeks of silence.  _ Waiting for me. _

There’s a manhunt in Virginia; he sees it in the news. It seems Freddie got her story after all. Will gets a brief thrill of satisfaction when he sees they’re calling him and Hannibal partners, accomplices.

He closes the tab, searches the local news next. His French is improving from doing this every day. He looks for signs of Hannibal’s work, bodies with missing organs, corpses displayed like macabre installation art.

There’s nothing, always nothing. He looks anyway.

* * *

It’s been weeks, and Will is getting impatient. So he finds a body himself.

More specifically, he finds a living person and makes it a body, an inanimate object to carry a message.

He finds a man who looks startlingly like himself, all curly brown hair and earnest eyes, and he wonders if Hannibal would like that more or less. Will baits the man across the bar with furtive glances from beneath splayed eyelashes, with glances and touches that linger just a little too long.

He comes to sit by Will, and Will buys him a drink. He pays in cash. The man asks him what the bouquet of purple flowers beside Will are for, flirting and open, and Will tells him they’re for a friend. He looks unsure for a moment, expressive face just about to tip over into disappointment, when Will tips his face up with a gentle finger beneath his chin and kisses him to distraction.

He looks dazed and just a little flushed when they finally pull apart, and Will smiles.

Will gets him drunk. He leads him into an alley. It’s frightfully easy. There’s no one around, and by now the man is too drunk to fight. He squeezes the life out of the man, watching with curious interest as the light leaves his eyes. Will doesn’t know his name, and he doesn’t want to.

He cuts the man’s heart out and places it in its hands—hands that now reach out, propped against his lap. An offering. Will hollows the chest and fills it with purple hyacinths.

It’s mawkish, maybe. A bit overdone. Obvious.

Still, the sentiment holds.

He waits one week. Two. But he’s not ambushed at home. No one accosts him in a dark alley and not for lack of trying. Will can’t sleep, doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t even try anymore.

Instead he wanders the streets at night with bruise-dark eyes, hunting. He leaves a string of crime scenes in his wake, hyacinths at every one. Love notes to Hannibal. 

Hannibal who never comes, who might not even be in Paris. Who might not be in France or even Europe, for that matter.

Months pass, and Will starts cutting their eyes out. The trails of blood down their cheeks look almost like tears.

* * *

Hannibal doesn’t show up, until one day he does. Will comes home from another night without sleep, and Hannibal is sitting on his bed. He looks utterly out of place in the featureless, tiny rented room Will now calls home. Still suits, still paisley, still immaculate.

The relief feels like being gutted all over again. It feels like glass in his throat.

The first thing he does is get his hands around Hannibal’s neck. That wasn’t part of the plan. There hadn’t really been much of a plan to begin with, but if there had, it certainly wouldn’t involve this.

And yet Will finds he can’t help himself. He wants to kill Hannibal, wants to kiss him. He wants to crawl inside his skin and make him stay forever.

Hannibal doesn’t fight him off, even as Will chokes him. He just tips his head back, and Will would swear the look on his face is almost rapturous. He lets Will squeeze, lets Will dig his thumbs into his windpipe until his breath is only a wheeze and Will feels the cartilage grinding beneath his hands.

Hannibal brings his arms up to wrap them around Will, at once cage, comfort, and shelter. He leans into it. They stay like that for long seconds, and Will can feel his eyes burning hot and wet.

Then Hannibal lets go and punches him viciously in the stomach, knocking the wind from his lungs. They collapse together, into each other, leaning on one another and gasping for breath.

“You came after me,” Hannibal murmurs, wiping the tears from Will’s face with one hand while brushing the fingers of the other over Will’s belly.

Hannibal finds the jagged, ugly scar unerringly, the place where his knife branded Will. The touch feels as much like a threat as a caress, and Will shivers with pleasure because of it, not in spite of it.

“You stabbed me.”

Hannibal studies him with a cool, inscrutable gaze. Will wonders if he’ll bring up the betrayal, if they’ll enumerate the many ways they had hurt each other and add another tally to the score, but Hannibal changes the subject instead.

“Hyacinths,” he says instead. “I didn’t think you spoke the languages of flowers.”

“I learned,” Will says. “For you.”

He doesn’t just mean the flowers. They both know that. But it’s easier to talk about the flowers than the body. The one that had led Hannibal to his door and was probably being inspected by Parisian police as they speak, and all the bodies left in their wake.

And all the others that had yet to die, but probably would at their hands.

A smile slides over Hannibal’s face, there and then gone again.

“Good.” Hannibal gets to his feet and dusts himself off. He holds a hand out to Will. “Breakfast?”

Will looks at the hand, mesmerized for a moment, lost in his own imagination. He can see death in those hands. Death, life. Hands that would usurp God, if given half the opportunity. He decides he would like to see Hannibal try.

And then he shakes off his reverie and puts his hand in Hannibal’s, allowing himself to be hauled to his feet.

“Sure, I’m starving.”

That earns him another smile, pleased and lingering. This, he thinks, is as close to good as they’re likely to get.

Hope might be the thing with feathers, but love is the thing with teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> Hyacinths, specifically purple hyacinths can mean "I forgive you" or "I'm sorry."
> 
> * 
> 
> In other news, I'm a newcomer to this fandom and wasn't planning on writing fic for it, but I finished watching the second season finale "Mizumono" last night, and it fucked me right up. Enough that I had to write something to fix it.
> 
> You can check out my [original writing here](https://hopezane.com) if you're interested.
> 
> [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture) | [Tumblr](http://lovetincture.tumblr.com) | [Dreamwidth](http://lovetincture.dreamwidth.org)


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